67 or not 67
Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:55:01 +0100

Visiting Chris O'Donnell's gopher hole [1] I realised that my favorite gopher browser, Chawan, didn't word wrap text by default. I fixed this [2] with a configuration parameter but started thinking about text width.

Back in the 90's when Gopher was invented, the typical screen dimension was around 640x480 pixels, and the maximum number of characters in a line imaginable was 80, or 8 pixels per character.

Which is why, in RFC1436 [3], the founding Gopher document, considered that it would be best to keep line length under 70 characters to allow space for tags to identify the type of document, as mime-types had only just been invented (although it's predecessor had been previously around for years in the Andrew system). So 67 became the standard character width for text in Gopher.

The notion that 33 years later one of the smallest laptop screens would be 1366 pixels wide didn't figure into it.

Today one of the oldest gopher browsers, Lynx, word wraps gopher text. Nearly all other gopher clients do too. If you use Gophercle in Android, where the screen width is often less than 67 characters wide, the display of fixed width text is an ugly staircase. I also believe that the number of 16 bit gopher clients on 640 pixel wide screens is somewhat reduced nowdays.

Because of all this, I've made an executive decision. From now on my Gopher phlog and articles will NOT use fixed width lines. 

My Gopher client is already configured to only show directory selectors as it uses mime-types to identify files, so with wrapped text I know I'm going to hell in a handbasket and that I'll make diehard RFC-only gopher pundits scream their lungs out.

Tough. It's 2026 guys, I don't use museum hardware even if I do have a 14 year old laptop.


[1] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/chrisod
[2] gopher://spike.nagatha.fr:70/0/phlog/2026/2026-01-26-20-08-Chawan-browser-plaintext-wrap.txt
[3] gopher://spike.nagatha.fr:70/1/documentation





 


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